As the use of electronic mail (“e-mail”) has become more and more pervasive, users have become inundated with an ever increasing volume of e-mail messages. In order to deal with the increased volume of e-mail messages, many users utilize e-mail client applications that support the use of e-mail handling rules. E-mail handling rules allow a user to define one or more conditions that should be tested for when an e-mail message is received. One or more corresponding actions may also be defined that are performed when e-mail messages are received that satisfy the conditions. For instance, an e-mail rule may be defined by a user that identifies incoming e-mail messages from a particular sender and moves any messages received from the sender to a particular folder for storage. As another example, an e-mail rule may be defined that identifies incoming e-mail messages that contain specific text in the subject line and then plays a particular sound when e-mail messages having matching text in the subject are received. Many other combinations of conditions and actions may be defined to handle e-mail messages in a virtually unlimited number of different ways.
Although many e-mail client applications include support for e-mail handling rules, this feature has long been underutilized by users. The neglect of this feature appears to be primarily due to the fact that the process of defining e-mail handling rules in many e-mail client applications is a difficult and confusing process for users. In particular, in some e-mail client applications the user interface for creating e-mail handling rules contains literally dozens of possible choices for defining the conditions and the actions to be performed when the conditions are met. As a result of the complicated user interfaces previously provided for defining e-mail handling rules, users have been discouraged from utilizing this valuable and time-saving feature.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the various embodiments of the present invention have been made.